Bose 900 Soundbar Review

Soundbars began as basic devices. Their goal was to make it easy for people to enjoy their TV and music without having to deal with complicated wiring. It was merely used for amplified sound from TV and also sleek system for home interior. Some soundbar models continue to provide this. Yet, the market has shifted towards to more speakers and less simplicity.

Even though it looks like an old-school soundbar, the $899 Bose 900 Soundbar is full of new, cutting-edge technology. Is it a good fit for your home theater? Let’s see if we can find out more about it. This Bose smart soundbar 900 review will go over the performance of this feature-loaded audio system.

More about Bose soundbars

Home entertainment has achieved a new level of quality thanks to streaming services. When you have a sound system that puts you right in the heart of the action in your living room, it might seem like you’re in a movie theater. The clean and thundering sound of a Bose soundbar can convert even the most difficult-to-hear speech and action sequences into a thrilling audiovisual experience.

When it comes to sound systems, the Bose Soundbar 300, 700, and 900 are all excellent choices if you’re looking for a system that can grow with you as your needs change over time.

These soundbars, on the other hand, have a price tag that doesn’t speak well for them. In addition, the bass is a little less lively and the soundbars have a smaller range of connection. And obviously, Bose 900 soundbar only has Dolby Atmos.

Bose Smart Soundbar 900

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The Bose Smart Soundbar 900 is the out-and-out replacement for yesteryear’s 700 model. It  is a standalone 5.0.2 setup with a premium design with Dolby Atmos, as well as spatial audio tech. The company says will make it an ideal all-in-one speaker for music and movies.

However, Bose may be a bit late to the game as most other manufacturers have Dolby Atmos capable models in the market for some time but as they say, better late than never. 

Pros

• Bold and bright sound – it’s also great for music
• Ease of use with HDMI eARC
• ADAPTiQ room calibration
• Built-in Alexa voice control
• Dolby Atmos object-based decoding adds to expansive soundstage
• Exceptional clarity
• Impressive Dialogue enhancement mode
• Many streaming options
• Ability to expand to 7.1.2 channels

Cons

• Reflective glass top 
• Expensive – especially if considering all accessories
• No additional HDMI input for passthrough
• Not capable of lowest bass output
• No DTS:X support
• Power cable too short

Specs

Product Differentiator

Dolby Atmos, the cutting-edge surround sound format for movies and music, should have been part of Bose’s $799 Smart Soundbar 700 when it was introduced in the second half of 2018. Even though the Smart Soundbar 700 didn’t have Dolby Atmos support, Sonos was able to enter the market with its own Dolby Atmos soundbar called the Sonos Arc.

This soundbar is great for anybody who wants a cinematic audio experience. According to most Bose smart soundbar reviews, this soundbar is also perfect for anybody who listens to music a lot since the surround sound makes you feel like you are witnessing a live concert.

With its Smart Soundbar 900, Bose has officially joined the Atmos bandwagon. Yet, the question is, is it really worth an additional $100?

Design

This Smart Soundbar 900 isn’t a rehash of anything you’ve heard before. An identical duplicate of the Smart Soundbar 700, right down to the gorgeous (but easily-smeared) glass top. On either end of the sheet of glass is a pair of oval holes that seem like they belong on a racetrack. Additional upward-firing drivers are housed in the soundbar’s top-mounted holes, They help the soundbar achieve the height effects that have come to be associated with Dolby Atmos.

The Soundbar 900’s overall design is polished, which is both a benefit and a drawback. For further aesthetic perfection, it includes a fine metal grille and a glass top-plate that are precisely spaced. There may be issues with the content itself. Glass has a naturally refracting quality to it. Underneath TVs, soundbars are installed. When the TV is on, it produces light. If you look at the 900 from the top, it looks like a canal full of water, which may give you some idea of where this situation is going. This isn’t ideal.

Only a single LED signals whether the ‘bar is on, off, updating, searching for connection and so on. It doesn’t have any on-product or on-screen menus, which is probably a good thing since additional light emissions would be even more invasive. Most people won’t even notice it since it’s so inconspicuous.

The 900 looks best in black, but it’s also available in white if you’d want your soundbar to make a statement visually as well as audibly. Designed for TVs with a 50-inch or larger screen, this soundbar is 41 inches long, 4 inches deep and 2.3 inches high. Among its nine drivers are four racetrack transducers, two PhaseGuide-enabled tweeters, two dipole transducers, and a center tweeter.

Connections

There are two ways to connect the Bose Smart Soundbar 900 to your television: through HDMI or optical cable. The soundbar won’t be able to receive a Dolby Atmos signal even if your TV supports it if you utilize an optical connection. Optical connections can’t handle the bandwidth requirements of Atmos, which needs HDMI’s larger pipe. With optical, you can still enjoy an immersive sound experience owing to TrueSpace technology, but you won’t get the complete Atmos experience if you don’t have HDMI.

The 900 only has one HDMI connector, which it utilizes to receive audio from your TV and to provide control instructions back to your TV. Having to give up one of your TV’s HDMI ports without a replacement will be a minor nuisance for the majority of consumers. If you have a lot of HDMI devices and your TV has a lot of HDMI inputs, you may need an HDMI switch.

Audio purists using older televisions have a different problem. It’s impossible to offer 24-bit, lossless Dolby Atmos in Dolby TrueHD if your TV doesn’t support HDMI eARC (which is most TVs that are older than two years), which is what the 900 is capable of supporting.

If you have a Dolby Atmos soundbar, you might overcome your TV’s HDMI ARC constraints by connecting a Blu-ray player or streaming media device to one of the soundbar’s HDMI inputs, and so bypassing your TV’s HDMI ARC limitations.

Key features

Dolby Atmos

A surround sound system known as Dolby Atmos allows you to perceive sound as a three-dimensional entity by placing noises and voices in their own area and giving them an additional dimension of height. This enhances the audio experience. You can utilize this soundbar even if the material you are listening to is not encoded in Dolby Atmos since it employs the Bose TrueSpace technology to evaluate other signals like 5.1 or stereo and upmix them to provide an engulfing sound.

PhaseGuide Technology

Smart soundbar 900 uses PhaseGuide technology to beam audio to different regions of the room. This technique makes it seem as though the sound is originating from somewhere other than your speaker. As a result, it seems as though the characters on the screen are rushing by you.

Built-in voice assistants

Use Google Assistant and Amazon’s voice-activated assistant, Alexa, to interact with your entertainment and information with the Bose smart soundbar 900. In order to hear your orders from any angle, voice-canceling microphones are included inside the soundbar. The mic off button may be used to turn these mics off if you’d want more privacy. Voice4Video technology on the soundbar allows you to use your voice to control your television and cable box.

Wireless connectivity

The soundbar’s wireless connection capabilities enable you to stream anything you want to it through Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Chromecast, Apple Airplay 2, and Spotify Connect, among other options. Wireless connection also enables you to connect several Bose smart soundbars in separate rooms, allowing you to sit in your bedroom while listening to music playing in your living room, for instance.

ADAPTiQ audio calibration technology

ADAPTiQ is a room calibration technology that scans your rooms and automatically improves the soundbar’s sound quality and volume. This allows you to fine-tune the soundbar’s audio so that it performs optimally in a certain space. After installing the Bose music app, you may begin configuring ADAPTiQ. If you make substantial changes to the environment or wish to add surround speakers later, you may return to the app and run ADAPTiQ once again.

Multiroom audio

Multiroom audio is one of the benefits of having a Wi-Fi-connected speaker. If you’d like, you may have all of your speakers play the same music in perfect rhythm, or you can divide your house into several groups of speakers, each playing a different song.

Using the Smart Soundbar 900 and additional Bose wireless speakers, Bluetooth speakers, and headphones, you can build up a comprehensive whole-home music system. Bose Music, Bluetooth, AirPlay 2, or your TV’s sound may all be streamed to the grouped speakers through the main speaker’s built-in services. However, managing such speaker groups is a little more difficult.

Remote control

Because there are no built-in controls on the Smart Soundbar 900, you’ll want to keep your remote nearby, even though you can manage all of its capabilities via the Bose Music app (we’ll get to that later). Only smart speaker capabilities are accessible through the smooth glass surface of Bose’s speaker (microphone mute, action button). You’ll need a remote or an app to control volume, mute, play/pause, and other features.

It’s odd that Bose included a basic, non-backlit infrared remote with the Soundbar 900, yet the Soundbar 700 comes with a much better, backlit universal Bluetooth remote. Because the Voice4Video function (which I cover below) is perceived as a substitute for most of the universal remote’s capabilities, Bose explained to me why it did this.

Bose Music app

While it’s possible to use the Smart Soundbar 900 only using the provided remote control, doing so would entail sacrificing a number of useful features. If you want to use the soundbar’s smart speaker capabilities, the Bose Music app (available for iOS and Android) will guide you through the setup process, including connecting the soundbar to your home’s Wi-Fi network, calibrating the sound with the included AdaptIQ microphone, and setting up either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa if you want to use the smart speaker features. The ability to use any of the natively supported music streaming services, such as Spotify Connect or Apple AirPlay 2, requires that the soundbar be connected to the internet.

The app also has all of the more in-depth options, such as modifications for the bass, treble, and height channels, in addition to the conversation enhancement mode. Using the remote, you will be unable to manipulate any of them. In addition, the app is the sole method to verify that the soundbar is receiving and playing Dolby Atmos audio signals.

Setup

Technically, you can make the Bose soundbar a 7.1.2 channel system with all the accessories, but it’s just a 5.0.2 channel system since there’s no subwoofer. Our arrangement does not allow us to experiment with this, but the wired connectors on the “bar” are meant to add on two more rear channels (the side ones remain “virtual” and are outputted by soundbar in front of room) and a center subwoofer.

This is a nice idea, but the overall cost is so high that you’d be better off just buying a Samsung HW-Q950T setup (a 9.1.4 that’s even more immersive – especially if you happen to have a Samsung TV with Q Symphony, which can pair with the TV’s speakers in addition for even more wall-of-sound output) rather than this.

Sound Quality 

The most important aspect of a soundbar is its sound quality, though. This Bose may be used as a wireless living room speaker, a Bluetooth audio source, or a combination of all of those things at the same time. It has a broad front stereo soundstage since it is physically large.

If utilized as a soundbar, it can play Dolby Atmos audio, increasing your television watching experience. The Dolby Atmos object-based format includes upfiring channels. This improves the sound quality. However, the greater immersion provided by this technology will make you feel as if you’re in a virtual reality environment.

However, the lack of a subwoofer or speakers in the box means that you won’t be able to get the lowest of lows rumbling away without shelling out extra money. In our opinion, the Soundbar 900’s bass output is more than enough, much beyond that of most television sets, and we doubt that you’ll notice if you have neighbors via a wall.

This Bose soundbar has a wonderful musicality to it as a whole. High frequencies are well-separated, and the soundstage has a considerable amount of height, making it an excellent choice for a high-resolution system. The Bose is an excellent option if your TV’s normal sound is too ‘low down’ – and this is a common problem with lesser quality soundbars.

Tahmid Shuvro

Freelance tech journalist & author of soundboxlab.com …Read More